The Bristol Cable – Editorial survey
What exactly is a CrowdNewsroom?
CrowdNewsrooms are online surveys focused on a specific topic or issue that the editorial team wants to work on. The Bristol Cable uses these surveys regularly to listen closely to their community.
The Bristol Cable designs CrowdNewsooms in different ways depending on what best fits their strategy. Open-ended questions provide real insights into the community’s thinking, while closed questions offer a good overview of how the community generally feels about a certain topic. Polls, in turn, are useful for weighting issues.
How The Bristol Cable’s Climate CrowdNewsroom Worked
“Tell us more about the impacts of climate change in Bristol!” That’s what members of The Bristol Cable repeatedly asked for. No question — it’s an important topic, and the editorial team knew that. The difficulty was finding the right approach. That’s why the community was involved in planning the new thematic focus from the very beginning.
Lucas Batt, Membership Coordinator at The Bristol Cable, walked us through step by step how he and the team planned, ran, and analysed the CrowdNewsroom. Here’s an overview of the steps:
Develop a strategy: How can the community help with the climate-change topic?
Create and send the question set, survey, and email.
Analyse initial responses and collect feedback from participants.
Adjust and send again.
Analyse the responses.
Developing a Strategy: How Can the Community Help with the Topic of Climate Change?
In the first step, the team defined what community engagement should actually achieve in this case and formulated a clear goal: “We want to bring together freelance journalists, environmental activists, Cable members, and readers who can help us jointly produce a series of articles.”
This led to the question of what members and other readers could contribute. The team collected the answers on a Google Jamboard:
The team also identified potential collaboration partners in advance — for example, freelance journalists who had already worked on environmental topics, and local climate-action organisations.
In the long term, the aim is to build an “infrastructure” to improve The Cable’s reporting on environmental issues more generally.
Creating the Questionnaire, Survey, and Email
Based on the engagement strategy, Lucas developed the questionnaire and distilled it into five questions:
What would you like to know about Bristol’s role in climate change — for example, how Bristol’s businesses contribute to it or how the city is fighting it? (open question)
What questions do you have about the impact climate change will have on Bristol? (open question)
Are there specific topics or problems we should report on in relation to climate change? (open question)
Are you an expert on climate change, or have you personally experienced the effects of climate change? (yes/no)
Would you like us to send you regular email updates on climate and environmental issues? (yes/no)
To create the survey, Lucas used the in-house survey tool within The Bristol Cable’s membership system. Google Forms or Typeform would have worked just as well in this case.
Lucas created the email announcing the CrowdNewsroom in Mailchimp. Here you can see the final version.
Before sending out the CrowdNewsroom, everything was checked one last time: Were there any errors? How does the email layout look? Does the survey work? And so on.
Analyze Initial Responses and Collect Feedback
Within the first 24 hours, the first responses started coming in, mainly from members. The same happened after a reminder about the CrowdNewsroom was included in The Bristol Cable’s weekly newsletter two days later.
The responses were then analysed along two categories:
Questions and ideas for reporting
Identification of experts
Adjust and Send Again
The feedback made it clear: the survey was very well received. However, one problem was that most people simply hadn’t seen the CrowdNewsroom.
Analyse Responses
In total, around 118 people responded to the CrowdNewsroom. Lucas compiled their answers in a large Google Doc, sorted them by theme, and highlighted notable points.
In the end, the document was about 30 pages long — too extensive for the editorial team to use effectively. Therefore, Lucas created a short version, summarising the main topics and most frequent questions on just two pages.
Lucas has provided us with the short version
Shortly after the CrowdNewsroom, the editorial team sent an email to everyone to thank them for participating and to explain how the responses would be used.
The Result
Satisfaction level: high — The Bristol Cable is very satisfied with the outcome of the C, as they received many valuable responses and were able to identify experts.
118 people responded to the CrowdNewsroom and shared their questions about climate change in Bristol.
The editorial team now has an extensive collection (a total of 30 pages) of community questions, which they can use to initiate research and report on the climate topics that truly interest the community. One of the most common questions from the community, for example, was about when and how sea-level rise will affect the port city of Bristol.
What We Learned
Good planning is everything: It’s important to carefully consider what the community can and should contribute. Being clear about this from the start saves a lot of time during analysis. Smaller teams, in particular, should think carefully about their goals and what they can realistically achieve to avoid overextending themselves.
The biggest effort is in the analysis: Most newsrooms don’t have a Membership Coordinator like Lucas at The Bristol Cable. He spent two full days reading, sorting, and summarising the responses. Therefore: ask only as many questions as you can realistically analyse, but make sure they are the right ones. Another option is to delegate the analysis — perhaps volunteers from the community or students looking to earn a bit could help.
Don’t be afraid of a second attempt: If, despite careful preparation, it turns out that the questions or the email approach weren’t quite right, it can make sense to revise everything and send it out again. The same applies if the Cwasn’t widely noticed.
Quantity is secondary: Fewer than 5% of Bristol Cable members responded to the Climate CrowdNewsroom. The result is still valuable, as the editorial team now has several starting points for research and contacts with multiple experts.
It’s also about the process: Community members who didn’t participate in the CrowdNewsroom still know that the editorial team listens and that reporting is shaped by collaboration with the community. Part of the newsroom’s work now includes highlighting community involvement in articles.
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